How can browser and mobile app testing be so difficult?

We are in this space where the things that we're building are being utilized in browsers as a primary mechanism for interaction.

And yet, I always have found in my two decades of software engineering experience actually validating what shows up there is always the most difficult part.

Like I write a unit test on some backend code and it's a joke.

But as soon as it comes to, is the CSS working? Is the components actually showing at the right time? Is there gestures for mobile stuff actually working correctly? I mean, good luck.

You are not alone in that.

Having worked on browsers for a decade, even browser engineers have that problem.

It's such a common problem.

Browsers nowadays, or at least for the last decade, have effectively been operating systems in their complexity, right? And you can look at Firefox OS, Chrome OS, even WebOS before that, right? And it was amazing what you could do from rendering to interactions.

And then you have all of this on multiple operating systems to do things slightly differently where Again, browsers try and do a bit of massaging to it.

And then you throw mobile into it and it's painful.

I mean, I love the promise of

frameworks, right? Because it creates this abstraction layer that potentially you could use to get reliable results everywhere.

But the whole world of how like CSS implementations are just fundamentally different between the different frameworks that power each of the browsers and the classes that are built in or the flags or whatever that you're utilizing.

And you need something like, even if you're using a framework, I'm sure too many people are unfortunately using React, but if you're using something better, you still have to deal with this post-CSS processing where you take what was actually generated and make it work on literally every browser.

It still doesn't work out of the box for everything.

So there's a lot of problems that I think when we're developing software that we really struggle with.

CSS is a fantastic example, right? Like Peter Griffin trying to open the blind and you've seen how that goes wrong.

That is CSS.

I'm like you.

I've done a lot of backend engineering.

I was never good at the UI side of things.

But I like the kind of automation part of it and trying to get it to do things.

And CSS has kind of grown organically.

from the years and then standards got in the way and they started cleaning it all up.

They had to retrofit a lot of stuff.